On Tuesday evening of this week I went to see a local model railroad museum. It had come to my attention in a local online news article. No, I’m not a model railroader, but I do very much like model railroads, and railroads in general. And this makes for a nice diversion from staying home and hibernating, as I am wont to do during Michigan winters.
I had been to this local and small museum many years before, when they were housed in the same building and adjacent to the local heritage museum. But they moved away to, I knew not where, when that museum needed the space for additional displays.
It was a pleasant surprise to find out they still existed and had a new home, in a building they owned.
The news article correctly noted that they were open to the public on Saturday for a few hours, and on Tuesday evenings from 1900 to 2100 (though the news said 7pm to 9pm). But they didn’t mention that the first Tuesday of the month is the date of the club meeting. This wasn’t a problem at all. I happened to show up exactly on time, and one of the members grabbed a folding chair for me and I was welcomed by the president and secretary, after giving my name and spelling it for their record. This was a monthly meeting after all.
As with any proper meeting you may have attended, they followed standard rules of order: reading the minutes of the last meeting, financial conditions, work by various departments (different model train gauge, library, building, etc.), old business, new business, and so on.
The meeting included about 25 people altogether, mostly grown men, with one mature woman, and one boy, though the bulk of the men were middle aged.
They were all congenial, and seemed glad to be present. Perhaps this was a respite from winter for them too.
They even grabbed some tickets and held a 50/50 drawing (which I did not participate for fear of winning), and sold 36 $1.00 tickets. The lone woman won, but donated her $18.00 winnings back to the club to a round of applause.
This was all quite pleasant for me to see. A group of people meeting for a harmless hobby that carried none of the baggage of the outside world with it. Well, almost.
During the meeting, the member who managed social media for the club gave his update, which included a significant uptick on engagement – probably driven by the television news coverage. I’ll note here that the member who ran the club’s social media was atypical of what I’d expect. It was a very heavyset man well into his seventies, whose appearance suggested someone unfamiliar with the workings of cellular phone, much less managing the social media for a club. (There’s me stereotyping!).
When the secretary called for this update, he first offered that he didn’t go on Facebook, as that’s where Taylor Swift was. The reference seemed to go almost unnoticed beyond that, and drew no response, except the president doing a facepalm and a light head shake.
At the end of the meeting, the president introduced himself and showed me around to see the layouts they were building, and made it clear that he hoped I would return. And I will, though I doubt I’ll become a member and participate as such. Again, I like the history of trains. I like looking at the pictures and artifacts. I like watching the trains and seeing the displays, but I’m not really an enthusiast of the hobby.
But the point of this commentary is because of that Taylor Swift reference, and how it shows the idiocy of the secretary.
First, I’ll mention the context, in case you, dear person, are reading this long after the events in question have occurred. This is February 2024, and six days before the Superbowl, and Taylor Swift (the most famous popstar in the world) is dating the star wide receiver of the Kansas City Chiefs, who along with the San Francisco 49ers, will face off in that season ending American football game. She and her boyfriend Travis Kelsey) have drawn the ire of the Republican media lately. He (to a lesser extent) because he has endorsed vaccination against Covid-19 and subsequent variations but mostly for being the boyfriend of Swift, who has caused such uproar on the right you’d think she joined John Lennon in claiming The Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
I am not exaggerating their response. The right wing talking heads are having conniptions about her, and practically rolling on the floor, thrashing about and speaking in tongues.
Why the anger? She is using her platform as a superstar to encourage her fanbase of “Swifties” to register to vote, so that their voices can be heard.
Yeah, encouraging young people to participate in democracy and perform their civic duty has caused the political right wing to name her enemy number one.
This says a lot about the intent of the political right in America today. Rather than building a platform that will appeal to more people, and especially to include young citizens, they are trying to stifle the civic participation of those who don’t align with them politically. They are not trying to win and gain political power with the consent of the governed, but by denying, discouraging, and disenfranchising those with whom they don’t agree, and thereby hold power from the minority. They seek to rule, rather than represent.
Now back to our railroad fool.
He’s a fool, and as the title of this piece says, has his brains in his caboose, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that he has almost certainly not formed the opinion about Taylor Swift through his own reasoning. How can you reason this out and still come up with the answer that someone encouraging democratic participation in a democracy is bad?
This means he is most likely hating on the woman because the talking heads on his television are telling him to. And their nonsense is evident to anyone who thinks with an actual brain. So, he’s not thinking for himself. A sin in our Republic.
Second, and maybe more telling, is his willingness to say it so bluntly to a crowd of people he only knows mostly through their mutual interest in model trains. And even in front of a person he has never met, and whom he would like to include in their club.
The idiocy of assuming like-mindedness of such an issue is pretty apparent. I was immediately reminded of an experience I had way back in the winter of 1977. Yeah, that long ago.
It was about the same time of the year, not long before or after Groundhog Day of that year, and quite late on a very cold Chicago night. I was seventeen, and was returning home after a Friday night shift as a busboy at a restaurant on Chicago’s north side. It was on Grandville Avenue, and to get there I rode the “L” north to Howard Street, from where I walked less than a mile home.
It was after eleven o’clock, pretty late for a teenager alone, when I climbed up the stairs to train level. There was one other person on the platform, a man who I guessed to be about forty or so. He nodded in my direction as I topped the stairs. I turned to the right and away from him, as a general indication that I didn’t want to engage with him.His nodding wasn’t unusual, Chicago was and is a friendly city.
The CTA has 24 hour service, one of only two cities (the other is New York) in America that has, but trains are infrequent off hours. I think they might have run hourly back then, but I can’t remember precisely. I mention this because it was normal to stand and wait for a train at that hour.
But it is also common to look down the tracks to see if the train was coming. You could see the headlights when the train was at least a couple of stops south, so frequently taking a glance was normal. It was 1977 after all, and there wasn’t much else to do while waiting.
As I took those glances I saw that man doing the same, though he would occasionally turn to look north on the platform, apparently to catch my attention. On one of those occasions he started walking in my direction. I wasn’t generally afraid of people, but from any point of view this was not a good thing. A grown man shouldn’t be approaching a solitary teenager on the train platform late at night. Though I do remember taking into account that I was almost six feet tall, and he might not be aware of my youthfulness.
When it got about 20 or so feet away he stopped, perhaps recognising the intrusion unwelcome. He looked again to the south on the tracks, and then turned back to me and said aloud, “Jungle Bunnies driving the trains” as he shook his head with a disapproving grimace.
I took a couple of symbolic steps away and avoided eye contact. When I peek up I could see him shaking his head again.
Let me be clear, I don’t think the train was late when it arrived, and I couldn’t see the driver clearly through the window, as the headlights of the car blinded the view. I boarded and went home, uncomfortable thoughts of this popping up in my head several times before they disappeared for years to come.
It joined the Navy that summer, and this took me far away from Chicago and the “L,” and was a decade or more later before I remembered the incident and reflected on it. I figured out by then why it was so troubling. Not only was I being approached by a grown man while alone at night as a teenager. And it wasn’t just the racism, which I didn’t like or appreciate back then. It was also the assumption that I could be included in his racism so easily. This has happened often in my life over the years, where racists presume that since I am also white, I must share the racist feelings they harbor. That the mere coincidence of skin color would allow them to insinuate agreement. And when I was seventeen years old and alone on that platform, I was hardly in a position to challenge that racism, but I wanted to. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t like the disparaging racial slur, and didn’t agree with it, nor have a problem with any race or gender being a train engineer.
And here on Tuesday night I wanted to draw a contrast between me and this man, this anti-American troglodyte who can’t understand the basic concept of democratic government. But I didn’t. I’ll save that for later. I will go back to the museum and look at the trains. And I will engage with people there on the subject of model trains, and real trains, and pictures of trains. And if that chap slips up again, I’ll let him dig a little deeper before saying anything. Perhaps a mind can be changed. But if not, it’s best to humiliate someone after they have tossed away their excuses.
If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll just shake it off.